A MAN IN A LADIES' WORLD

To

This Girl

I knew this girl once. Then again, I know a lot of girls. Knew lots of them even back then. By now, some of them have probably turned into legit women. Plump, maternal mothers and condescending mothers-in-law. Maybe, it’s just my destiny to keep bumping into girls all the time whether I like it or not. 

But the point is that I knew ‘this’ girl once. 

And she turned out to be some woman, I tell you.

“I feel like a man sometimes,” she told me once.

“Of course you do. You’ve never waxed in your entire life. You have bushy brows. You’re only half a girl,” I replied.

“No, no. I don’t mean that I feel literally like a man. It’s just that I feel that I would make the ‘husband’ in a lesbian couple.”

“That’s insane. For starters, you’re straight.”

“I don’t know...”

So that’s how this girl cemented herself in my memory, straight up lodged herself in a cold crevice of my brain one morning. She barely had a clue about what she was doing in a girl’s body, even though she had no desire to be otherwise. No short shorts for her, no makeup, no jewelry, and definitely no long, flowing tresses.

Some women can look beautiful sans makeup or effort. “Natural” we call it. She was not a natural, though.

Her hair was positively a crow’s nest.

“I don’t know what I am doing” was the motto of her life.

If you were a girl and you insisted upon a couple dance with her, she would hold you by your tiny waist, like the male partner does. Then, as if unsure of what she was doing in the first place, her arms would shift onto your shoulders and rest there uncomfortably. Finally, when she was just too frazzled by the dance, she would drop her arms altogether and scamper.

If you were a girl, she would open the door for you and hold it while you passed through. She would pull out your chair for you in a restaurant. She would even pay your bill. She would treat you right.

But only if you were a girl.

She gave no hoots if a man did the same for her.

“I don’t know. I’ve never thought about a chivalrous ‘man’ that way. I have met a few, never thought about them,” she told me.

Everybody thought she was just a girl. She was not gay either. And she was not asexual or impolite. But the biggest problem was that she had no clue how to “act” like a lady. If she were born a male, I think she would have for some reason, made the most respectful man I’d have ever known. 

But she was not a man.

Sad, though true. 

It was a wasted opportunity.

I know for a fact that she is very feminine, in her own wacky way. She grew up to be a woman after all. She has long hair now. She dresses up in t-shirts, maybe she still doesn’t like to play “dress up”. But deep, deep down, she has always been this strange woman.

A very strange, chivalrous, “un-womanly” woman.

That’s all I know about her...

Yours truly

SCRIBBLING A 'THANK YOU' NOTE

To

Teachers of the past, present and future



This is not the first time that I have chosen the written word over my voice, nor will this be the last time I do so. But in saying that, I also realize that there is no one better to ‘write to’. You might just appreciate words more than anybody else. You might, because you spend so much of your time scratching them onto the unyielding blackboard’s surface with half an inch of miserable chalk.

You must figure out how to etch those ‘words’ onto blackboards and unyielding minds. So I thought that the very words which you gifted me once, putting them on the blackboard when I was three, might just succeed where my voice cannot. They might strike a chord with you, even if they did not with others. They might take a stroll through the alleys which lead straight to your heart.

They just might.

Almost as if it were a rule handed down to me by my ancestors, I don’t wish people on birthdays dot at midnight, or make ‘handmade gifts’ for anyone at any point of the year, or even say nice things to them on the right occasion. Maybe, I’m not a nice person at all. For instance, I would never make a silly card using a random, shiny chart paper, draw a forlorn five-petal flower on it (since I can’t draw animals or human beings) and give it to you. I admire those who can get away with it. They get away with it successfully.

Unfortunately, I can’t.

How could a scrap of paper, with my poor drawing on it, ever convey the deluge of emotions fighting to come to the surface? How could it be a substitute for the sense of gratitude that I feel towards you, that simmers away in a cauldron locked within. This is what I have always thought.

And I’m not claiming to be very good with words either.

But when I think of ‘ABC’ and the alphabet, it takes me back to something which I can never have again. It takes me back to moments in history when you read out precious stories to me, and if I closed my eyes, I almost ‘believed’ them. It takes me back to the first time I scrawled something on paper so that it deserved a star in red ink. Back to an era when I would receive crayons if I behaved (and since I always did, I always would have an armory of rainbow-colored crayons ready).

Back to the brink of tangible memories.

Back to waves upon waves of History and Geography and Literature and Mathematics and Sociology and Political Science and Economics...

I felt grateful then, and I feel the same surge of gratefulness today. I thought that being a top scorer all my life would be enough to give back to you. Now, of course, I can see that it will never be.

You have given me that which I have no easy way to thank you for. Although you have taught me the alphabet (and taught me well), I’m not even sure that my written words are enough. There is always a ‘you’ walking beside me, in different disguises and names every time. In all these years, it should have become easier.

I realize that it’s just a matter of saying two untangled words—’thank you’—but to me they seem inadequate. They require something to back them up the way cardboard helps to back up loose paper. I’m yet to figure out how to make them sound hefty and meaningful enough.

Therefore, I will end with a ‘thank you’ just the same. But I will let the burden of deciphering fall on you this time. It will be up to you to see, or to not see as the case might be, everything that my ‘thank you’ is meant to convey. And if you can see right through it, even if you can feel my gratitude in half of its total strength, I will have succeeded.

And you will have emerged victorious, because you taught me how to use words well...

Yours truly